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Versions and Publishing

You never edit the portal your users are looking at. You edit a draft. When the draft is ready, you publish it, and that version becomes the one viewers see. Older published versions are kept as archived history, so you can go back to one if a release goes wrong.

Portals and designs are both versioned in exactly this way.

The lifecycle

A portal or design goes through these steps:

  1. A new portal or design starts as a draft. Nothing is visible to viewers yet.
  2. Publish makes the draft the published version. The Publish window takes an optional note describing what changed.
  3. New version creates a fresh draft as a copy of the published version. The published version stays untouched while you edit.
  4. Publishing again replaces the published version. The previous one becomes archived.
  5. Discard deletes the draft and leaves the published version as it is.
  6. Unpublish removes the published version. For a portal, viewers lose access until you publish again. For a design, portals already on a published version keep working, but new portals can't use the design until it is published again.

The Version group in the Portal or Design ribbon tab shows the current version number and status, and offers the operations the status allows. Fields are read-only on anything but a draft.

Version history

Versions opens the version history: every version with its number, status, note and dates.

  • Set as current makes an archived version the published one again. The version published until then becomes archived. Your draft, if any, is untouched.
  • Edit as new version creates a draft as a copy of the selected archived or published version. It is unavailable while a draft already exists, so discard or publish the draft first.
  • Double-click a version to open it in the editor. It is read-only unless it is the draft.

How portals and designs are linked

A portal version points at one specific design version, and each of its pages points at one specific layout in it. The link is to a version, not to the design in general.

This has two consequences:

  • A published portal can only point at a published design version. So a design must be published before a portal on it can be. A draft portal may point at a draft design, which lets you build both together.
  • Editing a design never changes a published portal by itself. The portal keeps showing the design version it was published with until you move it.

Themes are the exception. They are not versioned, so a theme change shows in every portal immediately.

Moving a portal to another design

Use this to adopt a newer version of the same design, or to switch to a different design altogether. The portal must be a draft.

  1. Open Portal → Design → Change. The Change Design window opens.
  2. Pick the Design and the Version. All versions are offered, archived ones included, so a portal can also go back to an older design version.
  3. For each page, choose the New layout in the target version. Where the target has a layout that matches the page's current one, it is filled in already. A layout in a new version of the same design always matches, and so does a layout in a duplicated design.
  4. Click Apply. The change is all or nothing. A page left without a layout blocks it.

Page content is kept. Content for a placeholder the new layout doesn't have stops showing. A placeholder the page doesn't fill yet offers Add content on the canvas. See Placeholders and content fills.

Where a published portal is

A portal is served at /ws/<workspace>/p/<code>, or at /p/<code> when Cross-workspace is on. Who can open it is decided by its access settings. See Access Control.